The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Andrew finds a way.

Andrew and his father came to a compromise over working at the tarquería. Andrew would work weekends and keep an eye over Alexandro and his Ecuadorian urge to forget things; in return, he would not be shipped to Escondido to be pawed and palmed over by his grandmother and her adult autistic son. Andrew agreed, for Escondido could wait until he proved himself against Ricardo.

Besides, Andrew gave no pretense to working at the shop. There were never enough customers, and there was too much vocabulary to learn for the SAT test three years away. Alexandro himself rather liked him leafing a thick dictionary instead of helping him chop tomatillos.

“What’s that ido—”

“Idoneous.” Andrew turned a page at the counter.

“Oh I like that. Very respectable.” Alexandro polished his forehead with a dishrag, “I-do-ne-ous. What’s another one?”

“Why bother? You can’t even use them in conversation,” Andrew said.

“When you get the house in Bel Air, you can say whatever you want. You can say, ‘I shat myself, please wash my ass. Or I micturated on the pillow.’ No one would tell the difference. They would fall over themselves just to clean you up.”

There was the tinkle of bells at the door and a short draft of smog and jasmine. Rosa twirled inside with dalliance of a floral dress, and the fresh look primed for a beautiful day completely inaccessible to Andrew, who was now whisking his book into a drawer and smiling awkwardly.

Andrew cut ahead of Alexandro to take order. After a long, humming gaze at the menu, she ordered one thing only horchata, always horchata. Alexandro worked on it while she took a seat. The light highlighted a triplet of welts on her cheek and was caught in the translucent fringe of her lashes. Andrew crawled his fingers over the steel counter, and waited for words to filter from the neural net of his mind and quicken his tongue. But this could not be. Not with Ricardo being her ogre of desire. Ricardo and his gorilla small-mindedness saving her from the lust of Carlos. Rosa would hyperventilate for the rogue, wouldn’t she? Not for him and his rheumy eyes and his blasted vocal cords.

His smile was tight and painful and still broad over the mask of his face as he handed her the order and then watched the skirt flap and flair down the sidewalk. The quiet spread thin again over the oily-smelling shop, then Alexandro said, “We need a more respectable word for shit.”

Laughing to himself, Andrew re-opened his book. Columbia had girls, Harvard had girls, even girls in Escondido. Rosa could have the course grounds of the fa**, and he would have better pickings in another three years.

Then Ricardo came in that same green tshirt and jeans (doesn’t he ever wash?) and a silver belt, and asked for the same order: ten tongue tacos. Andrew remained hunched over the daze of words in his dictionary while Alexandro took care of the order.

“Hermano, your stuff is the best. Elena can’t cook for shit,” Ricardo said to Alexandro, who was giving him a cuboid package of food. “Actually Mami’s food is better. Yours comes real close.”

“Maybe you should learn how to cook.”